Gratitude
Thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday. As it’s not a church holiday and is on a Thursday every year, it is the only major holiday of the year that I can be certain I will be off work for. But it’s not just that. I love to cook. Being a pastor and working with people’s spiritual and emotional health means that I almost never see anything through from start to finish–this work has almost always been begun by others and will continue on until we pass away. Cooking is a process that I can see through from start to finish–it meets a need that I think all of us have to see things to completion, and it enables me to be more comfortable with the ambiguities of ministry.
Perhaps the best thing about Thanksgiving is that it’s a holiday entirely centered on gratitude, and I think that’s something severely lacking in our daily lives. Let’s be honest, friends. The state of the world today seems bad. It is easy to become overwhelmed by anger, division, meanness, a dire economic outlook, and global uncertainty. It is easy to become hopeless. That’s why I think a regular practice of experiencing gratitude can do wonders for us.
A few years ago, I realized that the most important resident of my home is a plush bear that cost one dollar. Build-A-Bear has a promotion where, on your birthday, you can purchase a standard brown bear with “Happy Birthday” written on its foot, and the amount you pay is your age. So when Iris turned one, my father-in-law took her to Build-A-Bear and bought her one that she named, appropriately if unimaginatively, “Birthday Bear.”
While she doesn’t carry him around everywhere anymore, she still sleeps with him, and for most of her life, she has rarely been without him. Back in her pre-K days, when she could be particularly hard to get ready and get out the door, she would want Birthday Bear to ride to school with her, and before she could get out of the car, she had to give him a big hug and thank him for coming along. She had to pause, cling tightly to something that made her grateful, and only then could she go on with her day.
Methodist author Diana Butler Bass wrote a book on gratitude, appropriately titled Gratitude (clearly her skills for imaginative naming are in line with Iris’). In this book, she writes, “Gratitude, at its deepest and perhaps most transformative level, is not warm feelings about what we have. Instead, gratitude is the deep ability to embrace the gift of who we are, that we are, that in the multibillion-year history of the universe, each one of us has been born, can love, grow in awareness, and has a story. Life is the gift. When that mystery fills our hearts, it overwhelms us and a deep river of emotions flows forth–feelings we barely knew we were capable of holding.”
Though it is not yet Thanksgiving, I’m going to spend this week writing about gratitude. I invite you to join me on this brief journey and reflect on the things that make you grateful.
Rev. Ryan Young
